A School for Tomorrow

“You cannot know if you are not introduced,” goes a Malay proverb, “and you cannot love if you do not know.” It was in this spirit that Québécois publisher and civil liberties activist Jacques Hébert launched Canada World Youth, a unique experiment in global education, in 1971. 

For more than forty years, Canada World Youth taught tens of thousands of young people from around the world how to live together and adapt to circumstances outside their comfort zones. Whether in a longhouse in Malaysian Borneo, a village in rural Québec, or a dairy farm in Uruguay, they went beyond seemingly impenetrable differences to a middle ground where the building blocks for a lasting peace might be recovered: respect, mutual understanding, friendship, and a shared sense of humanity. 

This is a story about some of the people who brought Canada World Youth to life; the larger global movements, events, and disruptions they witnessed; and the organization’s struggle to survive in the face of the rapid changes and dislocations of the early twenty-first century.